


I like to think that you

by happyhuman



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Love Poems, M/M, Poetry, haz and lou - Freeform, pretty little lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-27
Updated: 2013-12-27
Packaged: 2018-01-06 08:12:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1104505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/happyhuman/pseuds/happyhuman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a love poem for those two boys who are strangers to the fact that soul mates exist in reality too.</p><p>"Put me like a seal over your heart,<br/>Like a seal on your arm.<br/>For love is as strong as death."<br/>Song of Solomon 8:6</p>
            </blockquote>





	I like to think that you

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't really a fic, to be honest. 
> 
> I wrote this poem for Harry and Louis while I was on a walk a few months ago, and I wanted to share it with the rest of you. There is not much left in this world that I find quite as beautiful as the love that those two boys share, and I hope that this manages to express that. 
> 
> I am not claiming any of this to be true. In fact, you'll see that this is intended to do quite the opposite. 
> 
> My tumblr (if you have questions or just wanna chat): wordylove

The things we say are too often not the things we mean.  
And the things we mean to say are rarely spoken.  
Just brain waves poisonously and perpetually suspended in the storm within ourselves.  
  
But I like to think that you say between you two,  
quiet whispers in the night,  
the three cursed words,  
wrapped up amongst the sheets that people don't know you share.  
  
I like to think that you have difficulty falling asleep.  
Because your feet are touching his,  
nose is inch from nose,  
and the canyon between you two has been paved over  
by the breeze of his breath on your cheek.  
And you never want to close your eyes  
because your reality is finally more divine than your dream.  
And maybe you two laugh every morning,  
awaking in the warmth of something other than a blanket.  
And that, with blinds drawn,  
with costumes hung,  
you two melt into something effortless.  
Simpler.  
  
I like to think that the subtext of all those  
pathetically obvious glances and smiles  
is not in fact subtext to you,  
but rather the bolded titled you wear  
proudly tattooed to your hearts.  
And that, like the songs they make you sing,  
you just know that he is the one.  
And every time he looks your way  
you feel guilty admitting how many flocks of birds cloud your lung judgment.  
And your chest feels shallow and distant when he touches you.  
And when he is away,  
the knowledge of his absence is brick heavy on spineless confessions.  
Because you just know.  
  
I like to think that you two fight sometimes.  
That your neighbors hear you bicker over stupid treasures in life.  
And you raise your voice louder than you sing,  
because you fear that if you don't,  
you will regret all those times you ever held your tongue  
with microphones pressed to your lips when you  
could have declared and defended your freedom with him.  
As if freedom must be defended in the first place.  
So you get flustered and passionate,  
pulling your hair out of your eyes,  
tearing at your clothes.  
You want to sleep anywhere but next to him,  
but you don't want to wake up without him.  
You want to storm away,  
but never leave.  
You want to slam the door,  
but never see him softly shrinking behind it.  
  
I like to think that your songs are written to each other,  
recklessly, intrepidly addressed with the rise and fall of the voices  
that brought you together.  
Maybe your lyrics weave your story  
into a mismatched, star-crossed puzzle  
that only you have the box photo to,  
only you have the cure to.  
And even as you sing to your fans  
or to those girls whose eyes don't quite compare,  
you both know that you will spill those verses into each other  
once you are freed from the lights that you are chained beneath.  
And maybe your tattoos etch into you both  
the inevitability of the brokenness  
and the beauty of the suffering  
that you have scripted and orchestrated in the black ink.  
And even though they may have your voices  
trapped in metal cages of dos and do nots,  
sings and sing nots,  
with pain you have crafted your world and your truths  
into flesh masterpieces.  
Placing each other like seals over your hearts and your arms,  
sacrificing yourselves into etch-a-sketches  
that we can only observe from above.  
  
I like to think that poetry reminds you of him,  
that words somehow contain the same awe  
that his eyes do when they look into yours,  
because they are green and blue,  
and they remind you of those photographs of earth from space,  
an orb in the black.  
And you just do not understand how that is everything that exists,  
yet somehow you know it makes sense.  
And maybe sonnets blur into daily conversations.  
Hours are lost to the ideal of romance  
that you try to bottle in the starry, maudlin lines.  
Children chasing after fireflies.  
Because you are metaphors to each other.  
And you have swam the oceans of simile,  
across the tides of figurative language,  
throw by the waves of carefully tossed soliloquy,  
just to land back into one another,  
gasping out the rhymes on that secret island beach  
that no map is able to contain.  
  
I like to think that you reminisce over your future sometimes.  
the where-is-this-going  
and what-about-ten-years-down-the-maybe-not-so-hypothetical-road,  
those fateful, battleground topics  
are all common ground beneath your feet.  
Maybe you have even constructed the names of the children you want:  
that son whose hair is strikingly similar to his.  
Those curls that your fingers might just be too familiar with.  
Or that daughter whose giggle harmonizes  
with his gracious laughter in your playlist of  
dreams-that-hurt,  
dreams-you-tuck-in-warily-at-night.  
Mistakes.  
Somehow.  
And maybe you two will fantasize:  
Cats or Dogs?  
City or Suburb?  
And then it hits you  
as if the tides have been stolen from the beach within you,  
an ache for memories that are not yours, yet,  
maybe never will be, yet.  
And your voices will mumble off,  
a sentence that neither of you really want to finish.  
  
I like to think that your phones are littered with pictures of each other.  
Sleeping.  
Making faces behind strangers.  
Attempting to cook you pancakes in the morning,  
his fringe sticking straight off his head.  
Holding babies that you wish were yours.  
Playing football.  
Swinging on swings so late at night that only your flash lights up his smile.  
Strumming a guitar while sitting on your bed,  
closed eyes,  
singing a song he wrote for you  
and is finally allowed to sing for you.  
Brushing his teeth with a toothpaste mustache resting above his lip.  
Wearing ridiculous clothing knit together by an unspoken,  
untouched nostalgia.  
Memories and pixilated secrets  
that people would spend hundreds on  
but never know the value of.  
  
I like to think that you consider him your family,  
that you have scattered your hearts into old photo albums,  
sharing the memories of the lives you lived without each other.  
Innocent smiles hid behind binkies.  
First grade outfits and shoes too big with socks too prominent.  
Maybe he has slept in your childhood bed,  
trying to get a sense of the unattainable side of you,  
of the distant smell that used to be yours,  
that doppelganger version of you that he wants to know.  
Maybe he comes over for holiday meals.  
and your mom hugs him just a little longer than she hugs you,  
because he is hers now too.  
And I know he is your best friend.  
Hopelessly your best friend who you would take bullets for,  
only to painfully retrieve and carve out the metal from your body  
just to load your own gun  
and return the shot to the one who fired first.  
But he is more than friend,  
because he is family.  
And though your blood may not pump through him,  
your soul certainly does,  
like little shattered pieces of you have been put back together in his eyes  
and his freckles  
and his childhood scars.  
He is family.  
Nothing is kept from him.  
There just is no need to.  
Because he is family.  
  
I like to think that the inside jokes you two share  
are so deeply rooted within you that even  
your closest friends sometimes tell you to shut up.  
And maybe all those unexplained moments we witness  
are in fact crystal to you,  
nothing more than the daily wonders that you both stumble onto together.  
And late at night after interviews or shows,  
photo-shoots or rehearsals,  
you two will collapse into laughter.  
And the air is playfully sweet with the  
i-cannot-believe-you-just-did-that  
and they-must-have-been-so-confused.  
But it is all just the coefficients  
and symbols and numbers  
forming the equation of what you two share,  
what you two are together.  
The same equation that you still cannot solve quite yet.  
  
I like to think that some people know.  
That when you are consumed by The Guilt  
that somehow originates from the purest part of you.  
When your name is being screamed from so many directions  
that the word has lost its purpose.  
When you have to pay someone to help you hide.  
When they ask you questions whose answers you want to curl up into.  
When, after all those hours of holding back,  
holding in,  
and screaming in your mind so loudly that you forget to take breaths,  
and your own voice is a stranger to you once quiet is re-gifted.  
After all that clutter and complexity,  
I like to think that there is someone who knows the truth.  
Someone to cover for you,  
warn you,  
be there when you just do not know what to do anymore.  
Someone who adores the fact that you love him,  
no matter the fame.  
Someone who believes it is almost as beautiful as you do,  
regardless of the secrecy.  
Someone who cannot carry the pain but can carry you.  
  
I like to think that one day it will all be okay,  
that you can be seen as we are all seen,  
walking antique London streets  
without appearing on bill-boarded accusations,  
cold-hearted miscommunications,  
magazine cover misconceptions.  
Maybe you two will be able to hold hands as everyone holds hands  
in public,  
yet private little squeezes remind you  
that brokenness is not irreparable.  
Maybe one day people will understand  
that you are a mind too,  
a head  
a stomach  
a heart.  
Because right now you are singing,  
or eating, laughing, thinking of someone,  
living heavy on the same ground,  
treading light under the same constellations  
that have been pondered since the first time  
the sun decided to share the sky with darkness.  
And maybe they will get it.  
Just maybe they will see that we are all made of the same dust.  
That once we were clouds or kings or pages of books  
or red wood trees or children shoes or boats.  
And maybe one day there will be no need for poems like this one.  
Because you are the poem.  
Because your lover is yours  
and you are his.  
And love is as strong as death.  
No water can quench it.  
No rivers can wash it away.  
  
I like to think that time is never enough for you two.  
Maybe you still want more.  
Always want more.  
That there is never enough time.  
Craving him even when he is with you,  
yearning for a glance even though it could risk it all.  
Even after hours of folding your body into his  
so that limbs are confused with limbs.  
And you are so dreadfully used to his arms snuggly tied  
around you,  
like bows on a present,  
that your own legs and hands become foreigners.  
After days of kissing him  
like you're swimming for the first time,  
floating in salty waters that dance and rock beneath you,  
shallow and wonderful and peaceful,  
like something that only exists for you.  
After months of tracing his skin,  
inch by inch like it is a test,  
discovering every corner you did not previously know of,  
tasting every mile of him like candy  
that belongs to you,  
only to you.  
After years of memorizing his rhythms,  
pounding through you and around you.  
Drum beats of a heart,  
of a quickening pace,  
of his footsteps,  
and breaths,  
and sighs,  
and pauses between phrases,  
and finger taps,  
and shallow coughs,  
and moans that turn your stomach into willow branches.  
All around you,  
until his presence is inevitable at all moments.  
And you recognize him from his subtle sounds at quiet hours.  
They hum through your bones,  
just beneath your skin.  
You can feel them.  
Like a dream.  
A fantasy.  
A chorus. Because time is never enough.  
  
I like to think that you often get concerned for what is.  
Worried for what isn't.  
Fearful of what may never be.  
sad that you care.  
And hateful that the rest of them do not.  
Lonely and incorrigibly guilty.  
Bitter and ashamed.  
Longing for unconditional pity from everyone or from anyone.  
Pressing palms of hands to eyes.  
Pulling knees of legs to foreheads.  
Too scared to pray.  
Because those things are born out of love  
just as much as the good and the great and generic.  
And maybe you even hate yourself for being forced to be a coward.  
Or you cannot stand the fact that your heaven consists of all the things  
they say you will go to hell for.  
And silently you cry.  
You know you cannot save him.  
And that realization is almost as agonizing as seeing him cry with you.  
And you fear that your tears have lost their salt,  
because you doubt that somewhere the birds are singing evermore.  
And all-you-need-is-love is a lie,  
because you have love yet you still have to hide.  
And you know that the truth is simple,  
but that does not make it easy.  
And the someday that justice promises is not today.  
It is not now.  
And all you want is now.  
And when they ask what is wrong?  
you just do not know what to say.  
Maybe nothing is right anymore.  
Remember when tomorrow was alone worth living for?  
And everything was worth dying for?  
The world was but a seed,  
a lump of clay not yet hardened.  
Now you wonder if every blessing you have ever grown  
and molded is nothing but a curse.  
Because it is you against the world,  
but you still have to live for it.  
Because no matter how small you tear yourself up,  
your weight will always remain the same.  
You want to shout something other than what they have instructed.  
You want to run but you do not know where to.  
You want to forget,  
to become the Nothing you were  
before he made you the Everything you are now.  
  
I like to think that the things you two say,  
and the hands you two hold when the camera is near  
are all trained little sounds  
and gestures.  
Olympic performances.  
Oscar nominated lies.  
Insignificant.  
  
And I like to think that what you really mean  
has always been what we might never hear you say.


End file.
